Greg scanned his sensors. The battleship was wounded, but not dead. It was leaking air and there were secondary explosions on the ship but it was still firing and at least some of its missile batteries seemed intact. It was still a serious threat. The decoy had failed to disable the battleship. Even damaged, if the battleship reached the planet, it could still devastate anything it could see.
“Well, Dad, I guess it’s up the pipes.” Rachel did not sound happy.
“I guess. You ready?”
Greg fired his engines and raced through the gaps where the battleship’s lasers still fired although with less coordination than before.
As they fled through the asteroid field, trying to get behind the battleship now continuing its rotation toward them, they were attacked by the scout craft which had not previously entered the battle. Rachel sat at her station operating twelve lasers mounted on four pods arrayed around the ship’s mid section.
Rachel alternated between softly singing to her self and muttering obscenities. After one obscenity Greg asked, “What is going on back there?”
“Dad, just drive. Keep your hands on the wheel and let me worry about this.”
Greg saw a laser impact an asteroid to his right and heard another obscenity. He was about to comment when Rachel shouted, “Loop left! Now!”
Greg spun the ship around and kicked the engines to full, the real full, not the full the pilot’s manuals approved, but the full the engineers said was possible but not sustainable. His forward motion translated into an arc and then to a circle as they looped around an asteroid. A missile passed harmlessly into space where they had been a moment earlier.
They came up behind the scout ship that had been chasing them, and Rachel fired a single missile. “Loop right! Now!”
The missile followed the heat of the scout’s engines, and with a silent series of bright flashes, turned it into so much debris floating in the asteroid field. Another missile narrowly missed them.
Rachel was talking to the enemy ships as if her words could be heard. Constantly firing the lasers, she was inflicting damage on their pursuers, but none of it was fatal. Greg and Rachel had known that once they fired the rock, they would be alone. There was no point in risking any of the Homestead ships in the expanding field of debris that would follow the detonation of the asteroid’s bomb. So once the asteroid started to move, they were ordered to retreat. Greg and Rachel were left alone to stop the battleship.
Four Swordsman scouts followed them through the asteroid field. The battleship maintained its high rate of fire as they attempted to get out of its field of vision. Using asteroids for cover could only last so long. Rachel dropped mines as they dodged the incoming lasers. She was able to kill two of the scouts with the mines. She stopped one with her lasers. They escaped the last one by flying through a hole in an asteroid only slightly larger than their span and leaving a mine in the hole. The battleship continued to turn and fire as it did. The asteroids absorbed the shots that did not pass by them.
“Load all tubes. Program for heat seeking,” Greg said.
“All tubes loaded,” Rachel replied.
“Prepare to hyper.”
“Hyper ready.”
Rachel knew exactly what her father was doing. Greg had pulled this move in simulations, but was successful less than half the time. Ninety five percent of the time they achieved the objective. Killing the battleship was not the problem. Getting away with it was. In the simulations they rarely escaped alive. If it was her time, it was her time.
They jumped into hyper drive from the midst of the asteroid field. Rachel assumed that her father had seen a clear path to beyond the asteroid field. Collision with an asteroid during the transition to hyper would be a spectacular, if not particularly welcomed, event. Rachel inflated the high G support structures in her suit. Without the suit’s support, the G forces of the sudden acceleration and the transition would cause her to black out if the blood in her body flowed away from her head. She controlled her breathing just as she heard her father control his. The ride was as brutal as she expected. The quick transitions into and out of hyper were as painful as she remembered. Normal transitions were uncomfortable, but this hurt! Her displays were blank while they were in hyper and she longed for information, any information, about what was going on outside.
Suddenly her displays cleared. Ignoring the residual pain, she scanned her displays. They were inside the heat cone of the battleship’s propulsion system. Fortunately it was not driving the ship forward because it was rotating trying to fire on them. Greg had dropped them too close!
“Fire!” he shouted. “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
Rachel smashed all four of her firing buttons. Four missiles leaped from their tubes.
“Reload!”
Four more missiles slid into their tubes as lasers sliced the space behind them. They were too close to the ship for the lasers to hit them, but a full throttle acceleration from the battleship would roast them just as quickly, but such an acceleration would send the battleship slamming into the asteroids.
“Reloaded.”
“Fire!”
Four more missiles leaped from their tubes just as the first volley found their targets. Greg spun the ship so it pointed away from the battleship and punched into hyper drive. The second volley penetrated the gaps in the battleship’s armor opened by the first volley of missiles and exploded inside the battleship’s munitions magazines. The wave of gas from the exploding ship overtook them as they frantically raced away, but did no damage. While they had destroyed the ship, they had not detonated the reactors for had they done so, the explosion would have been more violent, and they would not have survived that explosion. One battleship was out of action. Secondary internal explosions ripped the battleship apart sealing its fate. One battleship remained.
Greg and Rachel dropped out of hyper drive to assess their current battle status. They had lost four of their eight destroyers. The Swordsmen had lost six of their eight. The remaining Swordsman destroyers were still heavily engaged and it appeared as if they had suffered damage. None of the remaining Homestead destroyers appeared to be damaged although one had expended all its missiles. The Swordsman scouts Greg could find were engaged in uneven conflict significantly outnumbered by the Homestead scouts. Avi and Wendy had joined the dogfight against the destroyers.
Rachel had been right, while the Homestead space fleet was dealing with the armed vessels, the Marines had slipped through unopposed by manned ships. As he searched for the remaining invaders, Greg tried to evaluate how well another of his decoys had worked. He had placed cargo containers equipped with sensing equipment and lasers in orbit around the planet. The containers had been equipped with self destruct charges that would explode on proximity to a potential target. It had been his hope that these would catch at least some of the Marine transport craft before they were able to drop their troops to the surface. These diabolical devices had clearly taken their toll on the invaders. Of the 15,000 Marines that had been deployed to the planet, perhaps a third of them had been stopped by Greg’s “Q” containers. Wreckage of troop transports littered the space around the planet. Even after eliminating a third of the invasion force, 10,000 Swordsman Marines were still headed for the surface.
The second battleship bored steadfastly toward the planet. It ignored the decoys and headed straight in. Greg and Rachel looked at it in dismay. They had expended all their missiles on the first one. Most frightening was the fact that so many of the Marines had broken through. At this point they could not chase after the advancing Marines without being sitting ducks for the second battleship.
“Dad? What do we do now? We have to stop that ship.”
“I don’t know.”
Rachel scanned her displays. “There is nothing out here, maybe we should go after the Marines and take our chances.”
Greg started to plot the course when Rachel shouted, “Dad! Myra’s on the pipes! Myra’s going up the pipes!”
Greg punc
hed up the appropriate display.
“Four away!” Rachel shouted. “Get out of there! You’re too close!” There was a five second pause.
“Four more away!” Rachel shouted again. “Hits! I’m showing hits! Get out! Myra!”
Rachel continued to scream for Myra to get out. “Myra! What are you doing? Four more away!”
The third volley followed the first two into the ship’s propulsion system. A few seconds after the third volley found its mark, a huge ball of nuclear energy engulfed the battleship and Myra’s ship leaving a rapidly expanding plasma of gas and debris.
Rachel started to cry and scream Myra’s name over and over.
Greg calmly said, “Rachel, Myra knew what she was doing.”
“I know,” she sniffed, “but what about Jennifer?”
“She fired the missiles, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“They both knew the risks. We took the same risk didn’t we?”
“Yes, but we lived.”
“Only just barely.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Let’s go kill us some Marines.”
“Yes, Dad, for Myra.”
“For all of us.”
Greg and Rachel found one troop transport that had not dropped its Marines. Alone and undefended, it orbited the planet waiting to send reinforcements wherever they might be needed. Greg and Rachel attacked it and found it had only a small laser battery to fend them off. Armed only with their lasers, having expended the last of their missiles on the battleship, they pummeled the troop ship with all twelve of their lasers until they finally detonated the reactor. A missile would have been more merciful in that it would have been faster, but the result was the same.
“Rachel, five hundred men just died. Five hundred men with mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, some with wives and children. Does it bring Myra back?”
“No.”
“War should not be about killing. It should be about living.”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Let’s go in. It’s not over yet.”
HOMESTEAD - CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
DAWN SHOWED AS A SLIM band of light on the horizon. Sean and Sebastian stood on a low hill and watched the Swordsman Marine transports parachute into the ocean. They watched through their binoculars as the containers splashed down a few kilometers off the coast. Had this been an assault of one army versus another on the same planet, the first blows would have been struck by high flying aircraft. Fortunately, as far as Sebastian was concerned, spacecraft that could survive entry into the atmosphere were so hard to maneuver in the air that they were worthless as tactical weapons. Sebastian’s planned use of the shuttles and the cargo tug relied on deploying them in their airborne and not space going configurations. Even the swing wing assault fighters capable of entering a planet’s atmosphere from space had proved so difficult to pilot in ground support applications that few commanders were willing to risk their troops on the same battlefield with them. The assault fighters could be effective against a highly developed planet with large numbers of hard targets, but as spread out as this population was, the aircraft were of little use. As father and son watched, the assault began in the manner Sebastian expected that it might.
As Sebastian had hoped, a third of the Swordsman Marines diverted to the decoy sites in the Southern Hemisphere. The reports he was hearing from observers secreted in hardened bunkers at the decoy sites were encouraging. Each decoy site had a single operator who manipulated the site’s defenses by remote control. Each site had been carefully planned so that even after it fell and was over run by Swordsmen, the lone operator had an escape path. Most of the control suites had been built into naturally occurring caves. The control suites had been rigged with explosives which the retreating operator would detonate as they left sealing off the route they had just used to escape. They would then proceed through the caves to a camouflaged exit some of which were a kilometer away from the decoy site. The escape routes were provided with food and water to enable the retreating decoy operator to stay hidden for three days after their position fell. They were then to listen to radio traffic before emerging from their hiding places to be certain that they were not in danger. Each Swordsman Marine that attacked one of the decoy sites was one who would not be able to attack the real population centers in the Northern Hemisphere. Even given the numbers of Marines thus diverted, the size of the force descending through the atmosphere was daunting.
Sebastian sorely missed having access to an air force. The few small fixed wing aircraft they had other than the shuttles were too slow and too small to carry any real weapons. Flying them against the Swordsman helicopters would be suicide with no tactical benefit. He left them parked in valleys all over the Southern Hemisphere as a lure to entice Swordsmen to attack heavily armed decoy sites. At least his ground laser batteries had made short work of the aerial recon drones. Unlike a missile, a laser had no limit on its effective range and a welding laser was just as capable of destroying a drone as a weapon laser.
Perhaps what worried Sebastian the most was not the quantity of the Marines, but rather the quality of their training. He knew that a single Army Ranger could hold his own against a larger force of regular infantry personnel. It remained to be seen how well trained these Swordsman Marines were and how effective a force they would turn out to be. Sebastian’s combat experience with religiously motivated opponents was mixed. Some were as well trained as any Ranger. Some were horrendously inadequately trained by officers blinded by their zealotry willing to shed the blood of their comrades in arms for their cause. Others were like drug addicts who would continue to fight because their brain had not been able to tell their body that they were dead. The problem was that one frequently found all types in the same squad. As much as he was concerned about those types of soldiers, there was yet another who worried him even more and that was the one who killed for the fun of it. He had traded fire with soldiers for whom hunting humans was the ultimate sport. They enjoyed killing. It was like a drug. They were by far and away the most dangerous predators that ever existed and Sebastian knew that some of them would be landing on his planet. Drawn by blood lust to the Swordsmen’ Marines, knowing they would see plenty of battles, these thrill killers would be the toughest to deal with especially since they often split themselves off from the main units and ranged through the combat zone independently.
No sooner had the first of the Marines splashed into the water than the indigenous sea life attacked them. Sebastian had wondered how much protection these ferocious creatures they called “home-sharks” because of their resemblance to terrestrial sharks would provide. He knew that the Marines would have to drop their cargo containers and troop transports into the water, and he depended on the home-sharks to reduce the force that got to the land. The presence of these large, aggressive predators with strong territorial instincts was one of the reasons the settlers did not fish the ocean. Anything their size or larger entering their territory was vulnerable to vicious attack. These predators did not just kill to eat. They killed to defend their territory. These animals were so aggressive, a conventionally armed Marine without a protective mesh over their wet suit did not stand a chance. Fortunately for the settlers, these animals only lived in the salt water and did not enter the fresh water of the rivers or lakes. They would attack a shuttle if it stayed still long enough. The only reason the shuttles could take off and land on the water without interference was the speed with which they moved.
The water roiled as more and more of the sharks rallied to the defense of their territory when members of their species were killed by the Swordsman Marines. Underwater microphones placed to detect Swordsman submarines should they have brought any picked up the fourteen hertz thumping that was the sharks’ distress call and the twenty hertz blast that was their call to battle. Entire colonies of these fearsome animals swam aggressively to join the conflict as the Marines shot and killed them in wholesale lots. The animals might have s
uffered greater numbers of casualties, but the Marines lost complete companies of soldiers to the sharks’ razor sharp teeth. The sea battle turned the water dark red as human and sea creature alike sustained heavy losses. Some of the cargo containers folded open to form floating helicopter launch platforms. Desperate to escape the sea monsters, the Marines climbed aboard these platforms as soon as the helicopters had been launched. The helicopters headed directly inland and initiated their attacks on the decoy command and control centers.
Moving to their camouflaged observation post, Sebastian and Sean watched as the attack began in earnest. The Marines launched rubber inflatable craft and headed for the shore. The sharks continued to attack in spite of their rapidly dwindling numbers. They attacked the inflatable boats and dumped their passengers into the water where the annihilation continued. In preparation for this portion of the attack, the settlers had stretched razor wire across the bays and rivers. Some of the boats were halted by the wire, but it was quickly cut and pulled aside. Even so, some of the passengers in the stopped craft were dumped into the water where they were again set upon by the indigenous predators. Marines and sea life alike paid a horrendous toll fighting for control of the water off shore of the beach where the settlers had first landed in their shuttles.
The helicopters attacked anything that looked like communications or sensing equipment. They fired missiles at radar domes and radio towers. They used their lasers to cut power lines. The helicopters coordinated their attacks on anything that fired at them. Operating in teams of two, the helicopters carried sensors that could determine the source of any laser aimed at them. Returning fire with their lasers and with missiles, they were brutally effective in neutralizing the anti-aircraft positions. Within the first four hours of battle, the Swordsmen had disabled all of the anti-aircraft defenses with the loss of only five helicopters. Of the downed helicopters, two of the crews had survived the crashes.
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